Recurse Center Day 2

Day 2 at The Recurse Center was pretty awesome. Also, a bit overhwelming.

I came in dead tired – check-ins were cool and brief… throughout the course of the day, I attended talks/workshops on Django, Cryptography & Go. I’m really glad I did that.

I didn’t get too far into the Django workshop due to Environment Setup issues (I’m currently running Windows 8 & have a lot to do to get things working properly). So on one hand, I didn’t get as much out of the workshop as possible … on the other hand, it finally motivated me to start fixing things on my computer that needed to be fixed. It also made Django less abstract and scary to me – and I’m really glad of that. I’ve got it installed on my comp now – so any time I’m ready, I can mess around with it.

Similarly, the Go workshop was a bit over my head (due to my newness at programming), but now I know what it is, and I have some concept of what it does – so again, I can approach it in the future when I’m ready/need to.

The Cryptography workshop was beyond me mathematically & based on reading I hadn’t had a chance to go through yet. But now I have a starting point, and the fact that it’s meeting regularly helps give me structure to learn about it on my own & be consistent about it.

Otherwise, I’ve mostly been focused on social things – meeting other Recursers and hearing about what they’re working on. So I haven’t gotten too many big things done yet. I think tomorrow I’m going to make it a point to really focus on sitting down and doing actually coding & Python work.

A few small things I did accomplish today:
-“import this” – read the Zen of Python
-get comfy with Python interpreter in the command terminal (I normally use Sublime and used to used IDLE)
-get Git functioning properly in cmd terminal

Things to work on for tomorrow:
-Finish installing Cygwin & Bash
=Get Sublime Text into Path so that I can just type “subl”
-Continuing with Python Cookbook on String & File Manipulation
-Develop a level of proficiency that will allow me to go through the “Star Pusher” code comfortably and implement a similar system in the Game Jam game I’m working on outside of Recurse Center
-Read PEP 8 Guidelines